News Archive

The Bristol team of YFM Equity Partners have taken over managing the South West Ventures Fund through a newly formed independent venture capital fund manager, Technology Venture Partners.

The South West Ventures Fund was established as one of the UK’s nine Regional Venture Capital Funds to invest up to £2m of risk capital into high growth small businesses. The fund is now fully invested and the portfolio includes Dynmark, a cloud based mobile intelligence and messaging platform and Micrima, which has developed innovative technology for breast cancer screening based on radiowaves instead of X-rays.

The spin-out will see the South West Ventures Fund continue to be managed by the three founding partners of Technology Venture Partners, Peter Davies, Nick Simmonds and Julian Dennard. Technology Venture Partners will focus on investing in emerging UK technology companies.

Micrima, the Bristol company developing a safe, low-cost way of improving breast cancer detection, has gained CE marking for its MARIA (Multistatic Array processing for Radiowave Image Acquisition) product, paving the way for further supportive clinical trials in the UK and expansion into Europe.

Symetrica, the Technology Venture Partners portfolio company providing radiation detection solutions company has announced the appointment of David Price as Non-executive Chairman.

David Price was formerly CEO of Chemring Group plc, the FTSE 250 listed with revenues of £600m. Chemring is a specialist manufacturer of expendable countermeasures, advanced electronics and energetic materials for the global defence, security and safety markets. Prior to Chemring, David was MD of Rolls Royce Naval Marine, a division supplying propulsion systems, products & services to 59 navies for both submarine and surface ship applications. Naval Marine is a global business with a turnover of over £450m per year and employing 2900 staff. It undertook the design authority role for all Royal Navy nuclear reactor systems and manufactured all of the key components for the Pressurised Water Reactor.

Technology Venture Partners the technology venture capital firm has announced the appointment of Richard Green as Non-executive Chairman.

Richard Green joined Kleinwort Benson Development Capital in 1988 and was a founder in 2001 of the spin-out business which became August Equity LLP, where he was the Managing Partner until 2009 and then Chairman until his retirement in April 2014. He is a past chairman of the British Venture Capital Association and is currently a non-executive director of AIM-quoted Qannas Investments Limited, a non-executive director of Northern Venture Trust PLC, a member of the Advisory Board of Finance for Business North East and a member of the Advisory Committee of the European Investment Bank’s Growth Finance Initiative.

Symetrica has announced that its patented radiation detection and identification technology will be deployed in the latest Handheld Radioisotope Identification Devices (RIIDs) that Smiths Detection Inc. has agreed to supply to the U.S. as part of a contract with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Symetrica’s Discovery Technology is at the heart of the Smiths Detection RadSeeker handheld radiation detectors for which the DHS Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) recently awarded an IDIQ (indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity) contract with a maximum value of $143 million for the technology, its maintenance and associated training.

Object Matrix, the trusted storage partner to the media and entertainment industries, today announces that Sky, Europe’s leading entertainment company with over 21 million customers, has integrated MatrixStore object storage into Avid Interplay production workflows at its headquarters in London.

Sky is Europe’s leading investor in television content, with a combined programming budget of £4.9bn, commissioning its own original programming and entering into strategic partnerships to deliver the best possible TV viewing experience for customers. With production infrastructure often used to capacity, the Sky production team looked to find a solution that could not only scale into future workflows but also take the strain off the editing storage with seamless integration into current workflows.

Atlas Genetics Ltd, the Bath, UK based, ultra-rapid Point-Of-Care (POC) molecular diagnostics company, today announces that it has received approval to CE Mark its Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) test to be launched on the Company’s io® platform. By meeting the requirements of the IVD Directive (98/79/EC), the CT test is now cleared for sale within the European Union.

The launch of the io® CT test signals a new era in ultra-rapid molecular diagnostics. This is the first molecular POC test for a Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) to enter the market, capable of delivering test results in just 30 minutes. With the speed and accuracy of the io® CT product, the testing and treatment of patients within a single, brief visit to the clinic now becomes a reality.

For Covalent the deal provides significant future growth opportunities in its core financial and public services markets as well as opportunities for the enlarged group to expand its governance, risk and compliance (GRC) presence in healthcare, local government, finance and banking.

The deal marks a successful exit for Covalent’s previous funders. TVP’s Nick Simmonds said: “It has been a pleasure working with Peter McHugh and the team at Covalent Software and we are delighted with the way in which Covalent has developed into a technology leader in the GRC space. We wish the company every success for the future.”

Micrima, the Bristol-based breast imaging company and developer of a ground-breaking and CE Mark approved radiowave breast imaging system, has successfully closed on a new financing round of £2.6m. The new funding will support accelerated development of its patented MARIA technology, which aims to enable breast screening to become safer, more comfortable and more accessible to a larger proportion of the global female population. The company intends to start the commercialisation of its first system towards the end of this year.

“Breast cancer is the most common cause of death in women between the ages of 35 and 55 in Europe and the leading cause of death for women in many countries. The problem is that many tumours are not discovered early enough, largely due to the difficulty in discriminating between cancers and dense tissue using current imaging technology,” said Roy Johnson, Micrima’s Executive Chairman. “Using harmless radiowaves, the MARIA imaging system is capable of detecting tumours in dense tissue and allows routine and repeated scanning without any of the safety or comfort concerns associated with x-ray mammography. The process takes less than five minutes and avoids painful breast compression.”